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Thursday, April 30, 2009

Doing a little homework for tonight's Neil Young show at the Sprint Center, I came across a site devoted to the details of the hall-of-famer's guitar rig. If you're curious, prepare to venture down the rabbit hole (the site, a clearinghouse of previously published tidbits about Young's stuff, has links upon links upon links) and probably end up in an uncharted Canadian province populated by car-obsessed eccentrics.

A choice nugget:

From Neil Young interview in Zuerich Weltwoche (July 1996):

Young: You know, the sound is of increasing importance to me. We use very old amplifiers and tune them for each show. After the show we meet with the crew and talk about corrections for this kind of show, which is new to us too. Usually we play smaller venues, like for instance this bar near my house. We rehearsed in this bar for 3 months. Two, three days a week, sometimes four, we play two or three sets in the night. We've played together for 30 years, in fact there is a kind of telepathic relation between us. It takes time to develop such a situation into mature communication, which happens without words and without arrangements.

W: That sounds rather esoteric.

Young: Bullshit. It's similar to how the musicians in the old jazz era functioned. We don't have to prove anything to nobody -- besides ourselves. Only that brought us to where we stand today. Only that moves me. I can't go out with big light shows and that shit. No interest in that.